It has become a cliche to say that the Manchester United shirt weighs heavily on some players, but it is a cliche because there is a fundamental truth to it.
Few have come to understand that truth more intimately than Harry Maguire — through his own experience, and seeing it on the other side of the dressing room.
“I see a lot of players come into this club and, quite frankly, it’s just too big for them,” he says, bright and early on the second morning of United’s mid-season training camp in Kildare, Ireland. “The eyes on, the scrutiny, the analysis. Every goal that goes in, it’s someone’s fault.”
For a period, those eyeballs were incessantly focused on him, and the scrutiny came in increasingly strange, unorthodox forms. Some, like the mockery of his defending in the Ghanaian parliament, bordered on the absurd. Others, like the bomb threat that he received to his Cheshire home, were beyond the pale.
Does the 33-year-old believe what he experienced would have broken most players? “Yeah, probably. There’ll be a lot who want to maybe just close the book and just go elsewhere and restart their career,” he says. “It’s probably broken them a little bit earlier.”
What separates Maguire from those others is that he did not break or close that book. He stayed, he survived, and is still not going anywhere. Not for another year at least.
On Tuesday, United announced Maguire had signed a new one-year contract with the option of an additional 12 months. Talks gathered pace after Christmas, neatly coinciding with a “sticky” spell of injuries subsiding and his return to prominence under newly-appointed head coach Michael Carrick.
Maguire was able to speak to clubs outside England as a prospective free agent from the new year and believes he was not short of suitors. “But my focus was, like I said, getting this club back into a competitive situation.”
A 24-day gap in United’s schedule over the March international break saw the agreement finalised. “To be here for next season will be my eighth year, so to be here for eight years is a testament to myself really.” He deserves that moment of self satisfaction.
Maguire speaks with a hint of frustration that his career is viewed as a heartwarming redemption story, rather than one of broad consistency.
“I actually think, six of the (seven) seasons, I’ve performed really well,” he says. “I’d have loved seven out of seven, and not had this little blip along the way and everyone won’t be speaking about it as much.”
Yet the light of his return to prominence as a key player under Carrick is brighter against the shade of the difficult period to which he refers, from the summer of 2021 onwards.
It began in Gdansk, watching his United team-mates lose the Europa League final on penalties from the sidelines, then suffering the same fate upon his return from ankle ligament injury with England at Euro 2020 (played in 2021).
Maguire was named in UEFA’s team of the tournament despite only being fit enough to play five games, but the twin disappointments hit hard. “I probably just didn’t handle that as well as I should have,” he says. “That summer hurt, I must say.”
Jordan Pickford and Harry Maguire after England’s Euro 2020 final loss to Italy (Laurence Griffiths/AFP via Getty Images)
He was not the only one hurting.
“We went back to the England camp, the first one back and looked at the players, and Gareth (Southgate) spoke at the time about how out of form all the players were. There were a couple of lads who thrived after — Bukayo (Saka) was one who kicked on — but there were so many lads who struggled in that period after the Euros.
“When you’re Manchester United captain and when you’re a central defender, you can’t get away with that. You can’t get away with struggling.”
Carrington was no sanctuary. United lost seven of their opening 17 games in all competitions, culminating in Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s dismissal — described by Maguire as “a big, big loss”.
“I felt a lot of responsibility for that as performances leading up to Ole losing his job weren’t good enough for what was required for Ole himself,” he says.
A survey, conducted by The Alan Turing Institute, found Maguire received 8,954 abusive tweets during the first half of that campaign, second only to Cristiano Ronaldo among Premier League players. Under Solskjaer’s interim successor, Ralf Rangnick, the results and ridicule only worsened.
“The back end of the season was a mess really. It really was a mess,” he says. “I was the captain and I took a lot of the brunt for it, but it was a mess; we were all over the place. And it wasn’t to do with Ralf. It was more to do with how us as players and as a squad handled it.
“I wouldn’t say it was issues in the dressing room. I just felt like we didn’t handle it as well as we should have with an interim manager coming in compared to how we’ve handled it this time under Michael. You see how it can happen at Spurs at the moment with interim managers coming in. Sometimes it goes well, sometimes it doesn’t.”
A year later, despite coming through the worst of his poor form, Maguire was stripped of the United captaincy after losing his starting status under Erik ten Hag. His first emotions were anger and disappointment.
“That’s natural, but I always thought when you play at the top level, unless you are one of the superstars and a world-class player, you have ups and downs,” Maguire says. “You have things that you have to deal with.
“That’s why you see so many players have two or three years at the top, then they drop off and they wander off and go into a different country and you don’t hear too much about them again. To play at the top, you’ve got to deal with the ups and downs.”
Maguire sought reassurance in examples from United’s recent past of players whose ability was questioned, no matter how many times they had proven it. David Beckham and Wayne Rooney, in particular.
“They were unbelievable world-class players, so if it happens to them, it can happen to anyone,” he says. “I just kept my head down. I have great self-belief, more importantly, that I’m a top player. That’s what helps me when things are tough.”
It is worth remembering that the mockery happened away from Old Trafford and, far more often than not, was whipped up by rival supporters.
His lowest moment was at international level, rather than with his club: against Scotland in September 2023, when his introduction as a substitute was celebrated by the Hampden Park crowd. Each touch was met with sarcastic cheers, even though he was acquitting himself well. Then, he diverted an Andy Robertson cross into his own net.
The Scots almost invented their own word for schadenfreude. His mum, Zoe, hit back at critics on social media despite her son’s best attempts to stop her. “I didn’t want her to but she just said, ‘I’m doing it! I’m not listening to you!’”
Maguire scores an own goal against Scotland (Andy Buchanan/AFP via Getty Images)
Maguire insists he was always more concerned by the effect of the criticism on his family, rather than on himself. “They read about it more, they see things and it probably frustrates them a lot more, and they probably get involved a lot more.”
Still, he was left puzzled by his reduction from ‘Slabhead’, the lager and Jaeger-drinking cult figure of England’s 2018 World Cup campaign, to a cumbersome caricature.
“Sometimes it did cross my mind at the time: ‘Why? I don’t know why it has done this. I don’t know where it’s come from’,” he says. “I just thought it was normal at the time. I thought this is what happens, this is the fault of the club not performing well. But when you look back it probably did go a little bit too far.”
Maguire missed out on Euro 2024 through injury and has only played six times for England since that night at Hampden, though his two most recent caps came last month against Uruguay and Japan following his first call-up under Thomas Tuchel.
Yet Tuchel has since cast doubt on Maguire’s prospects of making the summer’s World Cup by insisting four other centre-halves — Ezri Konsa, Marc Guehi, John Stones and Trevoh Chalobah — are ahead of him in the pecking order.
Maguire is “desperate” to go.
“Whatever role the manager would want me for, whether that’s starting or deciding games late on… I still believe, even at my age, I’m arguably one of the best defenders in the world in both boxes. I don’t think that’s open to question, really.”
Maguire rises highest to head against the bar against Manchester City (Carl Recine/Getty Images)
The more immediate priority is qualification for the Champions League and then, whether he is part of Tuchel’s plans or not, at least one more season with United.
“This summer’s going to be a big summer — we’ve got to recruit really well. Obviously there’s a big manager decision as well, but it is about bringing players in,” he says, unprompted. “We need more players, we need better quality, we need players to come into the starting XI. And then when everything comes together, we’ll see where it is at the start of the season.”
After almost a decade as a fully-fledged top-flight player, Maguire looks at the landscape and sees a stronger but more “open” Premier League. One of the most compelling reasons why he wanted a new contract at United emerges: he has not given up on winning a league title.
“Over the last few years you’ve obviously had Manchester City and, before the start of the season, you knew you had to put a points tally together where it was some going to catch them,” he says.
“Arsenal are in a strong position of course, but next year we’ve got to be … come February, March, we don’t want to be adrift like we have been this year.
“Next season we’ve got to be in the bracket where, if we get the recruitment right, and everything’s positive from now to the end of the season, and we keep going on the curve, there’s no ceiling to where we can reach.”
Sensibly, he caveats that, checking himself a couple of times. “If we were speaking about this at the end of last season, you’d probably think we were a bit stupid, really.”
It would be quite the turnaround. But then Maguire knows a thing or two about those.